page_title: Jacques Sadoul (politician)
section_title: Death sentence and related scandals
hierarchical_section_title: Jacques Sadoul (politician) / Biography / Death sentence and related scandals
caption_attribution_description: English: From left: Béla Kun, Jacques Sadoul, Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Frunze and Sergey Gusev. Kharkiv Ukraine 1920. Russian Civil War.
context_page_description: Jacques Numa Sadoul, commonly known as Captain Sadoul, was a French lawyer, communist politician, and writer, one of the founders of the Communist International. He began his career in the French Section of the Workers' International in Vienne, and, by the time of World War I, was serving under Albert Thomas, the Minister of Armaments. A French Army Captain, he was Thomas' envoy to the Russian Republic, keeping contact with the socialist circles and steering them toward the Entente Powers. After the October Revolution, he maintained close contacts with the Bolsheviks, pledging them his support against the Central Powers during the crisis of 1917–1918. He was unable to prevent Bolshevist Russia from signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which took her out of the war, but, having established close contacts with Leon Trotsky and other communist leaders, became a communist himself.
  Opting not to return to France during the Russian Civil War, Sadoul co-founded the French Communist Group in Russia, fighting for control of it against Pierre Pascal and Henri Guilbeaux.
context_section_description: On November 7, 1919, Sadoul was ultimately sentenced to death. This did not prevent the SFIO from putting him up as a top candidate in the French legislative elections, on its list for the Second Sector of Paris. He was rejected by most of the local socialists, but supported by Bracke-Desrousseaux and André Berthon, and more indirectly by Léon Blum. The initiative caused national indignation. According to the Sisteron Journal, it showed that the SFIO was "duping" its voters, and adopting the "hateful principles of the Lenins and the Trotskys". As noted by historian Nicolas Texier, "the will of certain socialist to maintain the unity of the left" by granting eligible positions to Sadoul and other Bolsheviks cemented in France the notion of a "Red Peril".
  The revolutionary syndicalist Georges Sorel noted at the time: "in coming up with Sadoul, [the socialists] present themselves as a target for chauvinistic passions, without gaining much; this Sadoul would be a nobody in Paris were it not for his stay in Russia." Bolshevism and Sadoul's candidacy also alienated moderate leftists from the Young Republic League, who joined efforts with the mainstream conservatives of the National Bloc. As a result, the Bloc came first across the country—Sadoul himself won some 41,300 votes, short of the threshold. The news was welcomed in Europe's right-wing circles: the Romanian D. Nanu noted the socialists' "brazenness" in putting up "the traitor Sadoul"; the results, he argued, showed that "the fatherland ideal" prevailed over the Comintern.
  Meanwhile, Sadoul left his Ukrainian post and again headed for Berlin, where he tried to reorganize the German Communists in the wake of the Spartacist uprising. In the early months of 1920, he acted as instructor of SFIO members who attended the Second Comintern Congress, in particular Marcel Cachin and Ludovic-Oscar Frossard. Also joining them were Raymond Lefebvre, for whom Sadoul acted as guide, and the socialist organizer Lucien Deslinières, whom he introduced to Lenin. He also played a part in organizing the Congress of the Peoples of the East, but criticized Comintern Secretary Karl Radek for allowing the delegations to include anti-colonial nationalists rather than just communists.
  During the Comintern's negotiations with the SFIO, Sadoul approved of maintaining the unity of the party and of not stripping moderates of their membership. However, he played a part in expelling from Russia the SFIO's Ernest Lafont—he accused Lafont of not wanting to divulge information he had received about the Polish maneuvers in the Battle of Warsaw. As he put it: "Many whose conscience is clearer [than Lafont's] have had to be shot." Sadoul himself was stripped of his delegate position at the Comintern, in favor of Guilbeaux, and demoted to a consultative office. Alfred Rosmer, who sat on the Executive Committee, explains that Sadoul was still formally a SFIO member and his only other credentials were from the Communist Group. The decision angered Radek, who also "detested Guilbeaux for personal reasons". In the end, both Sadoul and Guilbeaux were given half-mandates.
  Although still legally married, Sadoul took an official mistress. Unaware of this liaison, Yvonne left for Moscow in May 1920, arriving there just as Sadoul's Russian son was about to be born. In January 1921, she sued for legal separation in Paris, noting that the confiscation of Sadoul's belongings by the French state had left her without an income. Jacques' brother Marcel had also settled in Moscow to do business, and worked as a Belgian representative in the Russian capital. According to his own words, he was "full of sympathy for Bolshevism, but not a communist". However, he criticized the Soviet regime for its bureaucracy and for keeping "the bulk of its population in misery"; Jacques Sadoul and Pierre Pascal were dismissive of such observations.
  The PCF was formally established at the Tours Congress (December 1920), of which Yvonne Sadoul was a secretary. At the time, Captain Sadoul was in Germany, returning to Moscow in 1921 on the same co
caption: From left: Béla Kun, Jacques Sadoul, Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Frunze and Sergey Gusev, photographed at Kharkiv in 1920
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